I am getting frequent crashes when playing source engine games, these crashes either eat my keyboard/mouse entirely, or run through the following sequence:

Game screen freezes, sound goes on a very short loop
I switch to an alternate desktop
I bring up the system monitor and find that all Steam and HL2/Dota2 processes are on something similar to "hrtimer_nanosleep", "futex_wait_queue_me" or "pipe_wait"
I kill them, since they're not responding.
I wait for them to actually die.
I go to open my "games tray" on the bar, and them my entire screen locks up, along with the keyboard and mouse.
I hard-restart my computer, since there's nothing else I can do.
Sometimes, on restart, I get a message along the lines of "vgaarb: Device decodes changed: olddecodes=mem+io, new decodes=none" Again, this isn't exact, as the boot-console logger doesn't get this message for some reason, and when I get this message, I only get a black screen when I boot (I have MATE set to start on boot-up, and I'm pretty sure that this means that this is my graphics drivers not finding something).

How do I find out what's going on enough to fix this? The crashes are getting more frequent.

(My system runs MATE, and nvidia proprietory graphics drivers, if that makes any difference)

Last edited by Illiander on Tue Aug 19, 2014 4:56 pm; edited 2 times in total

The first thing you said about sound looping, that seems to happen on source games on any distro for me. It happens in gentoo, debian, arch and mint.

I'm not sure about logging though.

Hopefully valve will start optimizing source games for OpenGL.

Janga

EDIT: I'm not sure about this but source games only crashed for me on gentoo/debian, not the other 2, only sound looping and general lag and just realised that you said the proprietary graphics drivers._________________GNOME 3 is like reinventing the wheel, and making it a triangle.

I can remember back when Steam first came to Linux that Gentoo needed to use Ubuntu's binaries for some things, because Valve had been daft and done something that meant we needed *Ubuntu's* binaries specifically.

I can't find anything about that anymore though, but maybe someone needs to update the binaries we use?

Are Mint or Arch Ubuntu-derived?

I've actually gone back to WINE for steam for the moment, because this is crashing me so often.

I have not experienced what you describe, and I do hope the issue isn't coming back, but I do have a couple of comments.

Illiander wrote:

I can remember back when Steam first came to Linux that Gentoo needed to use Ubuntu's binaries for some things, because Valve had been daft and done something that meant we needed *Ubuntu's* binaries specifically.

I can't find anything about that anymore though, but maybe someone needs to update the binaries we use?

By default, Valve bundles their own libraries with the steam package and uses them instead of installed system libraries. This behavior can be changed by setting the environment variable STEAM_RUNTIME=0.

I've had it enabled myself since the beginning I believe, and have had no issues really (except for the Steam browser not working at all with KDE, while it worked with Enlightenment... but now it's working with KDE again, too, so I dinnæ know!).

Illiander wrote:

Are Mint or Arch Ubuntu-derived?

While Linux Mint is based on Debian and Ubuntu, Arch Linux has been influenced by (but probably not really 'based' upon) Slackware, CRUX, as well as BSD._________________Kind Regards,
~ The Noob Unlimited ~